COMICS, OLD-TIME RADIO and OTHER COOL STUFF: Random Thoughts about pre-digital Pop Culture, covering subjects such as pulp fiction, B-movies, comic strips, comic books and old-time radio. WRITTEN BY TIM DEFOREST. EDITED BY MELVIN THE VELOCIRAPTOR. New content published every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday.
If fans of genre fiction were going to list the greatest adventure heroes of all time, Flash Gordon would be in the top ten of many lists and probably at least in the top twenty of most. So when Filmation produced a 90-minute animated film recounting Gordon's quest to save Earth from Ming the Merciless, giving it the title Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All is perfectly appropriate.
It was the success of Star Wars in 1977 that led to Filmation's trip to the planet Mongo. Flash Gordon was one of the major influences on Star Wars, after all, so was a logical choice for another Space Opera. Also, Lou Scheimer was a fan of the original comic strip and the movie serials starring Buster Crabbe. So Scheimer made sure the characters and story was treated with appropriate respect.
The movie was made in the late 1970s for NBC, but it didn't air until 1982. That's because NBC opted to go with a Saturday morning cartoon instead. So scenes from the movie were re-purposed.
That cartoon ran for two seasons. After it was cancelled, the original movie was reconstructed and broadcast in 1982.
And it was awesome.
The story (written by Samuel Peeples--who wrote the pilot episode of Star Trek) follows the original story arc from Alex Raymond's comic strip, though some changes and streamlining is done. The time period is updated to 1939, with Flash (an agent for the State Department) dodging German bombs in Warsaw.
A clue from a dying man brings him to the hidden laboratory of Dr. Zarkov. By now, he's been joined by girl reporter Dale Arden. The three end up on a spaceship, Travellng to the wandering planet of Mongo, which is currently on a collision course with Earth.
Approaching Mongo, they are shot down by fighters, then encounter monsters, then get captured by cavemen-like creatures, who target them for human sacrifice. Along the way, they meet Thun, king of the Lion Men.
Eventually, the also meet Ming and his beautiful but ruthless daughter Aura. Flash and Thun end up enslaved by Lizard Woman, who force their slaves to dig up radioactive ore until the slaves are crippled and blind.
While this is going on, Ming chooses Dale as his next wife and Zarkov is forced to work in Ming's laboratory. Zarkov also learns that Ming has cut a deal with Hitler and is supplying the Nazis with V-2 rockets.
To stop all this, Flash needs to incite a slave rebellion, convince various factions on Mongo to stop fighting each other and team up against Ming, then figure out a way to overthrow Ming before his marriage to Dale. Oh, and before Ming conquers Earth.
It's a great movie--imaginatively animated, well-written, aimed at adults in the sense that people get killed, and faithful to the classic source material. If its not the Greatest Adventure, it's still pretty darn great.
Not to take anything away from Flash Gordon as a hero--because he's a kick-butt hero--but the man simply could not settle on a single comic book company to recount his adventures.
King Comics, an offshoot of the syndicate that distributed the comic strip, started its own comic book line in 1966, offering (among others) a Flash Gordon comic book. This was actually quite excellent, featuring the work of artists such as Al Williamson and Reed Crandall and giving us some pretty strong stories.
This lasted 11 issues. Then Charlton comics took over the character, keeping the same numbering in a series that ran through issue #19. Gold Key picked it up--once again keeping the same numbering--and kept it going through issue #37.
The best of these runs probably is the King Comics, simply because of the quality of the art and writing. Flash Gordon #4 (March 1967), for instance, was written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Al Williamson.
There's a 13-page story titled "Lost Continent of Mongo," in which Flash, Dr. Zarkov and Dale decide to explore... well, Mongo's Lost Continent. Once there, they enter a thick fog and clip a wing of their ship on a building in a ruined city.
They are forced to crash land, at which point Dale is kidnapped by someone. Why Flash is surprised by this is beyond me. That woman is always getting kidnapped.
Zarkov is captured by soldiers soon after. Ming the Merciless turns out to be behind all this. When Zarkov is brought before him, he conveniently explains his latest evil scheme.
This is, of course, necessary in order to fit the story into 13 pages, but to be fair, egotistical rants are an established part of Ming's character, which helps tone down (if not completely eliminate) a sense of contrivance.
His plan, by the way, is to use a thought machine to generate a massive army of illusory soldiers, who seem so real that their weapons can really kill. As Flash puts it later in the story, those hit by the weapons of the make-believe soldiers are literally frightened to death.
I wonder if Goodwin or Williamson was deliberately lifting this idea from Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel Thuvia, Maid of Mars?
Flash is captured by a local tribe of barbarians who ride gigantic birds. By out-wrestling their chief, he becomes the leader and immediately leads them on an attack against Ming. This doesn't end well for his new allies--they are massacred by a barrage of make-believe arrows.
Flash seems to fall before the arrows as well, but he has realized the weapons were illusions and was thus unhurt by them. Faking his death allows him to get close enough to Ming to attack the villain. Zarkov, in the meantime, has wrested a raygun away from a guard and blasted the thought machine.
The story ends with Flash defeating Ming in a sword fight and Ming apparently committing suicide by throwing himself into a radiation pit. I have a feeling that its pretty foolish of the good guys to assume Ming is dead. He's been "dead" before, hasn't he?
Williamson may have been the best artist this side of Alex Raymond to work on Flash Gordon and the story looks fantastic. Goodwin's script is also good, though the need to fit it into 13 pages does show in a few overly rushed moments.
There's a five page "Secret Agent X-9" story (also by Goodwin and Williamson), then we jump back to Mongo for the 10-page "The Sentries of Dark Mountain." In this one, the heroes are marching across the Lost Continent, hoping to get home. They are attacked by a pterodactyl-like monster, which injures Dale (who at least doesn't get kidnapped this time). Flash zaps the monster, which turns out to be a robot.
Zarkov needs medical supplies to treat Dale's injury. On the theory that anyone who can build a complex robot probably has advanced medicine, Flash backtracks the monster. What follows is a succinct and well-scripted tale (no overly rushed moments this time) in which Flash meets two apparent humans who are guarding the entrance to their civilization. Only after various shenanigans that leave both the guardians dead does Flash realize they were androids, guarding the path to a long-dead people.
Williamson's art continues to look stunning. I once made a case that Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars is the perfect World of Adventure, because its premise allows for such a wide variety of threats and dangers. But the same argument can be made for Mongo. The many different alien races with various levels of technology, combined with the existance of so much super-science, pretty much means any writer playing in that sandbox can make a wide variety of stories fit comfortably into the premise. Like Barsoom, Mongo is designed to be a perfect World of Adventure.
Next week, we'll join Marvel Comics' Falcon as he plays detective to solve a murder.
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe is an undeniably awkward title. There’s a line of dialogue at the end of the last chapter that attempts to justify it, but it really doesn’t make sense. Flash isn’t conquering the universe. He’s merely saving the Earth from destruction and Mongo from despotism.
Heck, he does that every other Thursday. Maybe that would have been a good title—An Average Thursday for Flash Gordon.
Well, maybe not. But the producers really needed to have given their title a little more thought.
But, despite the title, it’s a good serial—a nice ending for the Flash Gordon trilogy.
It seems Mongo’s been a busy place since we last visited. At the end of the first serial, Ming was presumably dead and Princess Aura & Prince Barin were ruling the planet. In the second serial, Barin comes to Mars to aid Flash in his adventures there and stays behind at the end to rule over the Martian Forest People. (There’s no mention of what Aura—presumably back on Mongo—thought of that decision.) Ming has supposedly been destroyed for sure this time—zapped while inside a disintegrator chamber.
Now, without explanation, Ming is alive and back in charge on Mongo. Prince Barin rules the forest kingdom of Arboria (as he did in the original comics) and is at war with Ming. Ming, meanwhile, is dropping “purple death” dust on Earth. Mongo has been a busy place since the last serial and its kind of fun the theorize on how this exact situation came about.
So Flash, Zarkov, and Dale return to Mongo to deal with this. They team up with Barin and are soon in the super-cold kingdom of Frigia, mining for a rare substance that can counteract the Purple Death. This leads to an encounter with remote control robots rigged to explode when they approach Flash’s party.
Soon after, they must deal with another of Ming’s superweapons—projectiles powered by “zultrilnillium.” Of course, as any schoolboy knows, zultrilnillium projectiles have the power to set all Arboria aflame. I think that’s covered in second grade science class.
By the time this is resolved, both Dale and Princess Aura are prisoners of Ming, so Flash and his allies must now launch a dangerous rescue attempt.
It’s all great fun. Like the previous serials, this one makes great use of sets left over from Universal’s horror films and other A-movies. The fight scenes are energetic and the special effects are solid. I especially enjoyed the several instances in which Ming’s rocket ships engaged in dog-fights with Barin’s ships.
There were a couple of cast changes. Barin and Aura are played by different actors this time around. And Dale Arden is now played by Carol Hughes, who does a wonderful job of giving Dale some memorable spitfire moments when she vents her spleen at the villains.
Dale’s also been promoted from resident damsel-in-distress. Though she still fulfils this role, she’s also now described as Zarkov’s assistant and a skilled chemist and pilot. Good for her—she’s earned her spitfire moments.
And Zarkov has really moved up the “brilliant scientist” scale to obtain Reed Richards-level genius. He’s not just inventing stuff right and left this time around, but shows other skills as well. For instance, there’re a few chapters in which the heroes and the villains both have a run-in with the “Rock Men” who live in Mongo’s supposedly life-less Land of the Dead. They have their own strange language (bizarrely, this is represented in the serial by running the sound track backwards when they speak)—but that’s no problem. Zarkov recognizes it as a lost language of an early Earth culture, theorizes that many planets were somehow colonized by humans with a common language eons ago, and then begins to speak fluently in the supposedly lost tongue.
I really need to mention Ann Gwynne, who plays Sonya, a girl in Aura’s retinue who is really working for Ming. She begins to play a major part in the serial about half-way through, when she arranges for Aura to be captured by Ming’s men. She’s a great villain, managing to exude a real sense of malevolence while still looking absolutely adorable the entire time.
Ming, by the way, has traded in his ornate garb for a more military looking uniform. He’s now called “Dictator” as often as “Emperor.” This is a reflection of the times—even in a fantasy, the war raging in Europe couldn’t be completely ignored. Charles Middleton continues to play Ming with menacing hubris.
The first serial is still the best. It edges past the others in imaginative imagery and, most importantly, had the best supporting cast. We continue to miss Prince Thun of the Lion Men and Prince Vulton of the Hawk Men through both the sequels. In Conquers the Universe, Flash has a couple of Barin’s men as sidekicks and these guys are perfectly likable. But two mere humans simply don’t match up against a Lion Man and a Hawk Man.
This last serial, though, does have one heck of a cliffhanger at the end of one chapter. Dale’s about to be tossed into a flaming pit by the Rock Men; Flash is risking his life trying to rescue a Rock Man prince trapped on a ledge (thus proving they are friendly); and Zarkov is about to become a snack for a giant lizard. It’s three cliffhangers for the price of one.
By the way, this is the serial that uses the same screen crawl at the beginnng of each chapter (reminding us of the events of the previous chapter) that George Lucas later used at the begining of the Star Wars films.
That ends our Watch ‘em in Order coverage of the Flash Gordon serials. We still have a few Pellicidar novels to go, but we need start up another film series. Someone suggested the Marx Brothers movies and I’m all for writing about them, but I don’t think they fit into the In Order format—they each exist as an individual entity with the boys technically playing different characters each time out.
So we need to go in a different direction. Even though I wrote briefly about one of the old RKO Dick Tracy movies briefly a few years ago, I’m leaning towards covering those four movies in detail. Then again, doing select Charlie Chan movies that each highlight one of his children might be fun (at least four of his sons and one of his daughters get time in the spotlight during the course of the series). Or I could do select episodes of my favorite TV series Combat, concentrating on several excellent episodes directed by Vic Morrow. I haven’t decided yet. And I am, of course, open to suggestion.
Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938) picks up right where the previous serial left off—with Flash, Dale and Zarkov heading back to Earth after defeating Ming on the planet Mongo.
Dale is still played by Jean Rogers, but she’s now a brunette rather than a blonde. This was, of course, done to make her look more like Dale does in the comic strip. But it makes it look as if—in universe—Dale took time to re-color her hair during the trip home.
Gee whiz. Women!!
Anyway, there’s no peace for the heroic. A mysterious beam from outer space is wrecking havoc with Earth’s atmosphere. The trio (along with a stowaway reporter named “Happy” Hapgood) take off in a rocket trip and back track the beam to Mars.
The situation is thus: Mars is ruled by the pleasant-to-look-at but evil Queen Azura, who carries a white sapphire with her that gives her magical powers. (Azura, by the way, is a character taken from Alex Raymond's original strip, though I believe she was based on Mongo in the strip.)
Ming the Merciless—supposed dead on Mongo—is now serving as Azura’s chief henchman. He is planning, of course, on double-crossing the queen and taking over as soon as he can manage it. To this end, at least one of Azura’s soldiers is really loyal to Ming and he’s also managed to make a secret alliance with the savage Forest People of Mars.
Azura has a sort of self-made problem. She transforms people who displease or betray her into Clay People, then send them off to live in remote caves. But now there’s enough Clay People to be a threat to her. So Ming builds a “nitron lamp” that is shooting out a beam to suck all the “nitron” out of Earth’s atmosphere, using that element to build powerful bombs with which to attack the Clay People. This will have the side effect of destroying all life on Earth, but Ming is perfectly happy with that since he blames the loss of his throne on Mongo on an earthman.
Got all that? It’s actually a pretty nifty set-up for some good adventure storytelling. In fact, it gets even a little more convoluted. The Clay People at first think Flash and his friends are also enemies, there’s a black sapphire hidden in a Forest People temple that can cancel out Azura’s magic and Prince Barin (Flash’s chief ally from Mongo) shows up about a third of the way into the serial.
The screenplay manages to juggle all these elements quite effectively. In fact, the various shifting loyalties and hidden intrigues help provide quite a bit of suspense on top of the race to save Earth.
It’s nice to see Barin again, though fans of the first serial can’t help but miss Prince Thun the Lion Man and King Vultan the Hawk Man—the other members of Flash’s original motley crew of heroes on Mongo.
Production values are good—the light bridge that connects the airfield in Azura’s city with her palace (and it’s exactly what it says it is: a bridge made of light) is a fun effect, as are the bat-wing capes that most Martian soldiers wear. These capes can work as parachutes or otherwise allow their wearers to glide short distances. One effect—the Clay People emerging from the walls of their cave—is a simple dissolve shot that still manages to look appropriately creepy.
I don’t believe I’ve watched this specific serial before. At first, I was worried about the character of Happy Hapgood. Clearly, he was meant to be a comic relief character. As much as I love the serials of this era, the one thing they never did well was comic relief. The “funny” guys are never funny and are usually completely useless in terms of helping fight the bad guys.
But Happy, though he does have some comic relief responsibilities, actually proves to be a worthy ally. In fact, he gets to save Flash’s life on one occasion.
So does Dale—who gets a Crowning Moment of Awesome when she steals a strato-sled (think sci-fi jet fighter) and uses it to bomb some Forest People who are about to overwhelm Flash and Zarkov. If there’s any one complaint that could be made about the first serial, it’s that Dale doesn’t get to do anything other than wait to be rescued. But this time around, she has opportunity to pull her own weight.
Of course, in a later chapter, she’s exposed to the “Incense of Forgetfulness” by the Forest People and—in what may be the single best cliffhanger moment in serial history—stabs Flash in the back. But that doesn’t detract from her previous Action Girl moment at all. Heck, that pesky “Incense of Forgetfulness” would throw anybody off.
There is one more thing that deserves mention. Azura’s powers (which include teleportation as well as transforming people into clay people) are unabashedly described as magic. I was half-expected an explanation from Zarkov at some point telling everyone that it’s really some form of super-science. But no—it’s magic.
And, though Flash Gordon’s universe is technically one of science fiction and not fantasy—this fits into the story’s ambiance just fine. The solar system according to Flash is a pretty gosh-darn bizarre place and there’s actually room for a little bit of magic.
In the end, Ming travels so far into Crazy Town that even his own minions start to doubt him. The Earth is saved and Flash’s posse heads back home to a ticker-tape parade.
Overall, the original Flash Gordon serial is the better of the two, if only because of a slightly more entertaining set of supporting characters and some cool visuals (such as the Hawk Men’s floating city) that this one never quite equals. But Trip to Mars is still one of the best serials of the decade—a worthy addition to Flash Gordon’s interplanetary career.
One of the things I like most about it is how closely it sticks—both in story and in visuals—to Alex Raymond’s brilliant full page Sunday comic strip. The serial begins with Earth threatened by the approach of the rogue planet Mongo. Flash Gordon and professional Damsel-in-Distress Dale Arden meet when they are forced to bail out of a plane damaged in a meteor storm. This brings them into contact with Doctor Zarkov, who takes them along in his newly invented rocket ship to Mongo.
From there, it’s just one darn thing after another. Mongo is ruled by Ming the Merciless, whose minions soon capture Flash and his companions. But Ming’s beautiful daughter Princess Aura quickly falls for Flash, giving the good guys a chance to escape.
Aura is a great character. She’s in love with Flash, but is (at least at first) just as ruthless as her dad. If winning Flash means disposing of Dale Arden or committing other acts of violence (including at one point a rather casual attempt to commit genocide against Mongo’s city of Shark Men), then by golly she’ll do it.
But at the same time, Aura shows some positive traits and, by the end of the serial, has morphed into one of the good guys. The Flash Gordon Serials correctly points out that this sort of character development was rare in the serials and it’s one of Flash Gordon’s strongest points.
Flash, by the way, is in love with Dale and remains loyal to her (except for a brief time after Aura feeds him an amnesia drug). It’s lucky for Flash that he looks beyond outer beauty to decide who to fall in love with—because though Dale Arden is certainly easy on the eyes, Princess Aura enters full-scale Hubba Hubba territory.
Another strong point is the setting. Mongo is a world inhabited by hideous monsters. The relatively safe cities are divided among Ming’s human citizens, the Lion Men, the Hawk Men and the Shark Men. There’s also Monkey Men hanging around somewhere—Flash has to battle three of them in Ming’s arena early in the serial.
Ming is technically ruler of Mongo, but the Lion Men at least are in open rebellion against him and Prince Vultan of the Hawk Men isn’t that happy with Ming either. It’s a situation that’s used throughout the serial to carry along the plot and add to the suspense.
Vultan, by the way, is yet another great character. Played with boisterous fun by James Lipson, the portly Hawkman starts out as another villain. But, like Princess Aura, he also gets some real character development. Impressed by Flash’s courage, he also eventually becomes his ally. Heck, in pretty much any version of Flash Gordon every produced, Vultan always comes across as the guy you’d most want to have fun with.
In fact, Flash’s motley crew of followers is a pretty cool group. There’s Vultan, Prince Barin (the rightful ruler of Mongo) and Prince Thun of the Lion Men. Thun, by the way, is played by James Pierce, whose career (like Buster Crabbe, who plays Flash) included a stint as Tarzan. Pierce (Edgar Rice Burroughs’ son-in-law) played the ape man in both a silent films (1927’s Tarzan and the Golden Lion) and in a radio serial that began in 1934.
So we get a Tarzan/Tarzan team-up in this serial. To add to the serial’s geek cred, future Frankenstein Monster Glenn Strange does double-duty in a monster costume and as one of Ming’s soldiers.
Two other points are worth making. First, the stunt work in the numerous fight scenes is excellent. Second, the visuals and special effects are wonderful. Their relative primitiveness by today’s standards doesn’t detract at all, but instead gives them a charm and other-worldliness that fits in with the story perfectly. The sets and props were those previously used in Bride of Frankenstein and the Karloff/Lugosi horror film The Invisible Ray—their reuse here is still another factor in getting everything on Mongo to simply look cool. The minature work done specifically for the serial is also very good--most notably the image of the Hawk Men city suspended in the air by anti-gravity beams.
Anyway, after adventures and escapes too numerous to recount (just watch the darn thing—but DON’T FORGET THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE ABOUT WATCHING A SERIAL!!), Flash, Dale and Zarkov return to Earth. But it won’t be long before yet another interplanetary threat brings them back into action. In 1938, our three heroes will be taking a trip to mmars to save the Earth from yet another interplanetary threat.
I've written three books and a number of short ebooks about old-time radio, pulp magazines, classic comic strips, and Christian theology. You can find a link to my Amazon author's page below.
Magazine articles I've written cover subjects on military history and the American West. I teach several Bible studies at my church, assist with the children's ministry and have been on short-term mission trips to South Sudan, Haiti, Guatemala, Nepal and Turkey.
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